4 Critical Tech Tips for a Smooth Office Move Moving office spaces is a fresh start. Make sure your technology is enabling you to do your best work.

Opening up a new office is a thrilling, landmark moment for any business. When you do it, you want to make sure everything is done right—especially the technology.

Whether you're a startup just moving out of your garage, a large company mulling a downtown takeover, or simply opening up a branch in a new city, the office move is a moment fraught with relief, excitement, and inspiration.

Right before the move, you're cramming people into every last nook and cranny of your existing office. You're putting up partitions and seating people shoulder-to-shoulder.

When you move, you can start fresh. With these four critical technology tips, you'll be able to focus on celebrating how far you've come and building a team that works better than ever—not about sweating the logistics.

1. Put together a "Bring Your Own Device' program.

Moving to a new office is a great opportunity to leave your old, clunky systems behind and start fresh technologically.

One of the most popular moves companies are making today is toward Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD programs. Businesses that do are letting their employees work using their own tools rather than ones that are issued or owned by the company.

BYOD programs can come with anxieties, of course. Companies worry that allowing people to use their own technology will invite security issues. Employees worry that BYOD will mean their employers being able to access their private emails or voicemails.

That's why any real BYOD program requires an integrated Mobile Device Management program, or MDM. You need to be able to keep all your organization's devices—whether owned by you or by employees—secure, protected, and tethered to the company.

2. Stress test your Wi-Fi infrastructure.

A new, modern office needs Wi-Fi that works across every corner of the office. Leave the patchy, temperamental Wi-Fi in your old office.

If you can't offer secure Wi-Fi when you have a valuable client on a site visit, you're not going to leave the impression that you're a forward-thinking, technologically-capable organization.

One big problem is that walls, cubicles, columns and other structures can stop Wi-Fi signals from propagating in ways we don't expect when we first move in. You can easily end up with an office full of wireless dead zones if you don't account for those obstacles and stress test your space.

The best way to accomplish all of this is to find a single vendor you can trust for all of your networking needs and agree on a plan that involves installation, monitoring, and trouble shooting. You don't need your office manager to burn a whole day trying to figure out why the internet is down with the support teams of a dozen different companies. You want one number to call.

3. Use online collaboration tools to open your office to the world.

It can sound like a paradox, but one of the most "business critical" aspects of the modern-day office is its ability to seamlessly integrate with the outside world. You have employees working off-site, employees who travel the region or country, and employees working from home—your ability to communicate vital information can't end at the walls of your office

Desktop sharing applications, audio and video conferencing systems, and document sharing tools like Google Docs and Quip can help your team share new ideas faster. You can create a project proposal and get your entire team to look at and comment on it by the end of the day, whether they're on the other side of the office or the other side of the word. Then, you can act, and execute faster than your competition.

Your new office move isn't just an opportunity to create a better, more forward-thinking office space. It's a chance to use your office space as a hub for your entire company, no matter where they are.

4. Bring all your communications onto one platform.

We all know the annoyance of not having a video call with a team member or manager work properly. If you've ever had that happen with an important client, then you know it can even be embarrassing or potentially harmful to your business.

The problem is that we take "enterprise" services at their word, and then we're disappointed to find that they're little more than superficially-polished versions of consumer products.

Many of our modern-day communication problems are fixed when you work with an integrated communications provider. You don't have to teach new employees how to use a suite of different applications or worry about whether those different applications will play nice with one another.

So unify your communications. Your IT team will be thrilled by the thought of not having to bring your old private branch exchange to the new office, your employees will be happy to use applications that actually work together, and your clients will be pleased to see that they're working with a company that has its technology together. It's a no-brainer.

For more tech tips, check out Sprint's downloadable PDF survivor's guide to opening a new office, or learn more about their mobility-as-a-service solution.